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[Full of wax, but you can see his eardrum...]
[[narrator] Dr. Thomas Sullivan has been treating kids and writing notes on paper]
[Now he and his staff carry laptops.]
[Right now I'm just going to order the vaccines.]
[[narrator] Children's National Medical Center is helping more than a dozen doctors]
[pay to turn these mounds of paper into computer files.]
[The idea is one day doctors, clinics, pharmacies, hospitals,]
[even school nurses can easily share information.]
[The old paper record was a big, thick book like this.]
[Now if I have a question about this in my office,]
[[Dr. Brian Jacobs - Chief Medical Information Officer/Children's National Medical Center]]
[if I'm down the hall or even at home, I can pull up that child's electronic record,]
[[narrator] But a study by the Harvard School of Public Health]
[finds less than 1 in 10 hospitals have electronic records]
[with doctors' notes, nurses' notes, patients' allergies, shot records,]
[x-rays, prescriptions, and few are able to communicate outside the building.]
[When you go to the emergency room,]
[[Dr. Ashish Jha - Harvard School of Public Health] they can't necessarily]
[pull down the records of what happened when you went to see your internist last week.]
[[narrator] Last year Harvard found only 1 in 6 doctors use electronic records.]
[The biggest barrier: the cost.]
[Millions of dollars for big hospitals, thousands for small practices.]
[[Dr. Steven Zimmet - Pulmonary Critical Care/Virginia Hospital center]]
[It's probably about $40,000 to $50,000 a doctor.]
[[narrator] This Virginia hospital is about a year away from putting electronic screens]
[like this at every patient's bedside.]
[[David Crutchfield - Chief Information Officer/Virginia Hospital Center]]
[Read the barcode on the drug to make sure it's the right drug, the right dose,]
[the right time, and it matches it up with the original physician order]
[to make sure that that is exactly what that physician intended.]
[[narrator] That's a big relief for Dr. Sullivan.]
[[Dr. Thomas Sullivan - Pediatrician] Sometimes I couldn't even read my own prescriptions.]
